Reimagining Friar Laurence: from Circum-Mediterranean Novellas to the Shakespearean Stage

This essay aims at shedding light on the circum-Mediterranean reshaping of Friar Laurence, a representative of the Franciscan order whose figure famously migrated into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet via Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Tragiques (1559), Matteo Bandello’s Romeo e Giulietta (1554), and Luigi Da Porto’s Historia de due nobili amanti (1530 ca.). Largely bearing upon recent debates on source study, specifically on the reconceptualisation of linear transmission as a dynamic process of intercultural, interdiscursive, and contextual influence, the essay re-examines Shakespeare’s portrayal of the friar in view of the stratified narrative renditions present in Romeo and Juliet’s source chain, situating its cross- cultural transformation within the historical, discursive, and literary framework of the early-sixteenth-century Mediterranean region. Such palimpsestic readings are analysed in the light of the authors’ biographies and cross-referenced with a relevant set of “‘imported’ foreign practices and ‘translated’ discourses” (Vitkus 2003, 13) that came to be intertwined with the Romeo and Juliet story during its circum-Mediterranean migration. The aim is to identify the different stages of Friar Laurence’s transformation from Da Porto’s self-serving hypocrite to Brooke’s ambivalent helper, shedding light on how, why, and under what circumstances such variations took place.